In my last entry I talked about playing around with a few different boss ideas. I said that I could always simply recreate bosses from various shmup games as a fallback option. To that end, I spent two weeks creating those kinds of bosses, and I can safely say that I don’t enjoy them one bit.
The above boss, with the placeholder graphic stolen from somewhere online, was my most earnest attempt in this style. He moves around and fires projectiles straight at the player, conjures pillars from the bottom of the arena, and the light blue projectiles that grow from the wall. The blue things surrounding him are his recharging shields, which can be eventually beaten through, although the player can sneak some shots in through the frontal opening.
The reason I gave him these shields was because I wanted to force the player to be underneath the boss in order to do damage. This is one thing that comes to shmups naturally through their design. Since there is no aiming in shmups, you need to position your avatar in very specific places, at least horizontally, in order to damage the intended enemy. In a 2D shooter, the player can move around and aim free form, which places less of an emphasis on positioning, at least in this respect.
The player already has numerous incentives to position themselves in certain ways, such as avoiding damage, targeting a specific enemy, or picking up an item. Forcing them to be in a fairly rigid spot to damage the boss asks the player to make tactical decisions in terms of positioning. I like this, and might steal this concept for some other enemies, such as the entrenched machine gun operators. Unfortunately, I dislike pretty much everything else about shmup bosses.
For example, typically the way shmup bosses work is by having a number of simple bullet patterns interwoven with each other. While each individual pattern is dead simple to avoid, the difficulty arises from the complex interplay between all of them.
I was wondering why I never liked this sort of gameplay until I realized that there really isn’t that much going on other than a more complicated form of rote memorization. The simple patterns combine into a more complicated pattern, yes, but solving the complicated pattern is a bit like solving one single tactics puzzle in chess. It doesn’t matter how difficult the puzzle initially was, once you know the trick it loses all interest.
Watch anyone of high skill beat a shmup and you’ll see this in action. They’ve figured out the counter-pattern to the bosses attacks, sometimes called “routing,” and they win without taking damage. Figuring out the routing might be a lot of fun, but once done it’s little more than a mindless execution test.
Trying to make shmup bosses of my own confirmed to myself that I just don’t enjoy this sort of thing. The more interesting bosses I’ve made are the ones that are far more similar to other enemies, fighting in arenas more similar to the rest of the game. They walk around following the player, or appropriately behave depending on their weaponry. Their attacks can be blocked by cover, or otherwise interrupted. They have various states they can be in, such as stunned, recovering from a melee attack, etcetera. Most importantly, they can be manipulated by the player, instead of simply executing their movement and attack patterns as if nothing is happening.
There is a strong argument to not bother with bosses in a game anyway. One of my favourite games of all time, the original Halo, doesn’t have any, instead having some set pieces with various changes to the arena. The main argument for having bosses is simply as jokes, or storytelling opportunities, such as the OnlyFans Succubus who “attacks” the player by displaying pictures of her cleavage all over the screen so that the player can’t see what’s going on. I think focusing too much on the gameplay of the bosses was something of a dead end, and it’s definitely not going to be the focus moving forwards, which will be finishing the rough draft of a playable campaign.
Actually, the focus of this website is going to be finishing the game. I’m dedicating the first few months of my 2025 to this project, successful or otherwise, and I’ve found that I can only focus on one thing at a time. That means directly political content is going to slow down to a crawl. I’ll probably publish the occasional piece here and there, but that’s all taking a back seat.
I understand that might not be of interest to a lot of site frequenters, but I have to be selfish with this if I ever want something to ship. Thank you for your patience.
I too long for the day when this game will be finished, Dr. Sheckelstine.